Opening up a historic treasure, the P-I photo archive

The first thing you notice when opening a drawer of one of the dozens of file cabinets in the P-I’s photo archive is the strong odor of photographic chemicals. That analog technology and millions of expertly timed shutter clicks helped preserve nearly 100 years of history of the Pacific Northwest.

These treasures have been locked in a dark, underground room at the P-I’s waterfront building, accessible only to the handful of people who understood the filing system and recognized the value of this historic archive.

Well, Seattle, we have plans to share our history with you. We have been hard at work scanning tens of thousands of photographic prints. We have recorded the original captions and are ready to share with you an incredible look at our city and its people.

The value curve of a photograph

If you graph the value of a photograph it is high around the time it was taken. Everyone immediately wants to see it. With digital cameras people will often gather around an LCD screen to see the image. At that moment, it’s important.

But as time passes photographs become filed, deleted or forgotten. In the case of the P-I archive, many of these folders have not been opened in decades.

Over time the value curve of a photograph rises again. Things disappear, buildings are built, people age. Photos become valuable records. They show us how we changed, and how we were.

The Kennedy, John F. drawer. (iPhone photo by Joshua Trujillo)

Our former head librarian Lytton Smith worked hard to maintain the P-I’s vast archive, always making sure photos were put back in the proper folder after they were pulled out for publication on anniversaries of news events or when someone died.

But many images that seemed ordinary at the time were printed, published, filed and never seen by the public again.

Our plan is to publish two themed photo galleries on seattlepi.com each week, scanned from our print archive. Some galleries will have more photos, some fewer. We began our project in the “Seattle” section of our archive. Later we will move to other sections and topics.

On some of the photographs you will notice markings made by desk editors. Some were painted on decades ago by news artists, trying to highlight content for reproduction in newsprint. We have decided to include many of these markings and leave the retouch paint, since trying to remove it would likely damage the photos. Some of the photos are torn, some yellowed. But most of them are fascinating.